Quantum annealing is a similar approach to adiabatic quantum computing that uses the similar anneal schedule achieves low-energy solution states without strict adiabaticity [1]}. The intuition behind quantum annealing is that during the anneal quantum effects will allow the exploration of energy structure of the problem by tunneling through energy barriers [2]}, [3]}, [1]}, [5]}, [6]}. In practice, of course, noise limitations limit the effectiveness of the technique, but nonetheless, such devices have been built that increasingly are able to find low-energy states of problem Hamiltonians for ever increasing problem sizes.
